A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

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The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

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Tuesday, October 13, 2015

ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY -- CONCLUSION

The first part of my screed on analytic philosophy, journal
articles, and books appeared five days ago.Herewith the second half, originally promised for the very next
day.First, some words of
clarification.I shall be talking about
moral and political philosophy, not about epistemology and metaphysics, or the
philosophy of language, and most certainly not about logic.I simply do not know enough about those
fields to have opinions on which I would put any reliance.

Second, my thesis today really has very little to do with
the difference between short and long pieces of philosophical writing.My central concern is with the notion that moral
and political philosophy are scientific [or wissenschaftlich,
more accurately, in the German sense], that they are bodies of objective
knowledge that accumulate incrementally through the work of generations of
philosophers, some perhaps working even as teams, in somewhat the way that
scientific knowledge progresses.Once I
have explained what I understand moral and political philosophy to be, it will
be clear why I am inclined to expect that it is more likely to find expression
in longer, even book-length, productions, rather than in essays appropriate for
the standard professional journal, but that is a secondary matter.

One final note before I begin.I shall here be summarizing ideas on which I
have written and published for many years.I shall try to make reference to some of those publications for anyone
interested in pursuing the subject, but to keep this within manageable limits,
I shall take a good deal as already explained.

I begin, as I so often do, with The Good Book. The universe is called into existence by the
Word of God:"And God said, Let
there be light, And there was light."[Genesis, chapter 1, verse
3.]Or, as John says, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was
with God, and the Word was God."[John, Chapter 1, verse 1.]Or finally, as C. S. Lewis tells us in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe,
Aslan roared the world into existence.

In the Judeo-Christian
tradition, the universe is a story told by God, and, as literary critics teach
us, the world of a story exists from a narrative point of view.Although Judaism and Christianity are myths, they
contain deep philosophical truths, for although the natural world is not a story told by a Creator God,
society is indeed, in a manner of speaking, a story.But it is a story told by all mankind, to
itself, rather than a story told by a narrator to an audience.[See my essay, "Narrative Time:On the Inherently Perspectival Structure of
the Social World."]

Although literary analysis has
much to teach us about the nature of fictions, in at least one structurally
fundamental way, society differs from a narrative: each of us lives within the collective story we are telling as we live out our days.Each of us is both teller of and listener to
the story of society, and it therefore requires an effort of great complexity
and subtlety to arrive at a perspective, or standpoint, from which we can talk
about this story.

It might be supposed that there
is a privileged standpoint outside society from which a philosopher,
sufficiently gifted, might achieve objectivity in the telling of the story of
society, rather like the point high on a hill overlooking a battle on the plain
below that Lucretius imagines as the philosophical perspective in De Rerum Natura.Or, to cite a much less exalted example, like
the "Original Position under the veil of ignorance" of John Rawls.But there is no such place.That was Rousseau's error in Emile, who imagined that if one could
clear away the corruptions and distortions of society in the rearing of a
child, what would emerge was natural man.

The source of Rousseau's error
was his failure to realize that human beings are radically underdetermined [the
work of Erik Erikson, in Childhood and
Society, is instructive here.]Each
of us grows to healthy normal maturity through the internalization of norms,
roles, expectations, regulations of instinctual energies and bodily functions,
in the course of which process we become identifiably members not of society tout court but of a particular society
at a particular time.Hence Erikson
says, in a hauntingly beautiful passage, that "an individual life is the
accidental coincidence of but one life cycle with but one segment of
history."[See my mahy-part blog post,
"How to Study Society."

A great philosopher reflecting
on his or her society struggles to achieve sufficient narrative distance to
achieve some understanding of the society while never forgetting that he or she
is both embedded in and is a product of it.This effort requires such literary resources as irony, which allows for
multiple voices in complex relation to one another.

A novelist learns from earlier
novelists, but does not write sequels to their works, instead creating original
works of his or her own.The voice of
the novelist is an essential component of the novel.That is why the sequels to Pride and Prejudice, which apparently
number in the hundreds, are utterly distinct from the original, which lives in
Jane Austen's authorial voice.

Great works of moral or
political philosophy have more in common with great novels than with great
pieces of scientific research.They are
powerful and provocative efforts by their authors to achieve a voice in which to speak about their
societies and times in history.The
greatest of them, like Das Kapital or
Leviathan, or The Republic, remain foreveras exempla of successful struggles with the task of achieving both
distance from and engagement with society.That is why we continue to read them -- in the original, if we can, in
the best translation we can find otherwise.

It is easy now to see why no
great moral or political philosophy is co-authored, in the manner familiar from
scientific publications, by a group of researchers.A fiction written by a committee is not a
novel, it is a SitCom or a soap opera.

We can see, too, why journeyman
moral or political philosophy has little or no value at all, whereas journeyman
Biology or Chemistry or Entomology may have genuine value indeed.Mediocre novels are amusing ways to make a
long plane trip pass, but they offer no genuine ironic insight into the human
condition.And though Mill's Utilitarianism can help us to understand
mid-nineteenth century upper middle-class English society, yet one more journal
article on act- versus rule-utilitarianism tells us nothing at all of value.

To return to the question with
which I began, five days ago, it may now be easy to understand why genuinely
great moral or political philosophy is more likely to be written in book-length
bites.Achieving ironic distance from
one's society, and then reflecting deeply on it, will probably require a little
breathing space -- not four hundred densely packed pages, perhaps [or eight
hundred, in the case ofvolume one of Capital], but only rarely twenty
pages.It may also be clear why great
moral or political philosophy does not really need many footnotes.

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.